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11 1 ‘Here is a Protest’: Intervention and Recovery in Dexys Midnight Runners I had a need, in me, to find a way of saying that ‘I’m Irish and I’m not shit’ Kevin Rowland1 In the closing moments of ‘The Waltz’,the final track on Dexys Midnight Runners’third and final album,Don’t Stand Me Down (1985),the group’s lead singer, Kevin Rowland, emits a striking gesture of unambiguous dissent.Mixed to the fore of the track’s sparse sound (comprising guitar, violin and slow-paced snare), Rowland forcefully reiterates, in spokensung form, a simple vocal phrase – ‘Here is a protest’– drawing out the sonoric contours of the latter word before an upbeat coda. Described by Sean O’Hagan as the album’s – and thus the band’s – ‘defiant parting shot’, this overt gesture of refusal served as a remarkably apposite postscript to Rowland’s Dexys venture, which comprised a series of self-conscious interventions on Irish–English affairs.2 This project was ensconced on the group’s debut single,‘Dance Stance’(1979), in which Rowland’s austere chorus – an unadorned litany of well-known Irish authors – supplied a strategic antidote to prevailing conceptions of the ‘thick Paddy’ in popular discourses.3 Meanwhile, Too-Rye-Ay (1982), the group’s second LP, offered a celebratory re-working of traditional Irish sounds as part of a self-conscious effort – on Rowland’s part – to offset the negative value bestowed on Irishness in early Eighties Britain (an attitude encapsulated in Rowland’s statement cited in the epigraph to this chapter). This interventionist ethos attained critical mass, however , on Dexys’ third and final collection of songs (the aforementioned Don’t Stand Me Down), which staged an oblique and emotive address to second-generation experience – and Anglo-Irish issues in general – before the upfront assertion of ‘protest’ outlined above. This chapter explores the diverse means by which Rowland invoked and articulated Irish ethnicity in the work of Dexys Midnight Runners 12 ‘Irish Blood, English Heart’ (1978–86). There are currently no scholarly – and scarcely few ‘serious’ journalistic – accounts of Rowland’s work in the vast body of writing on popular music. Moreover, in the few essays in which the singer has been cited or discussed, issues concerning Irishness are either sidelined or overlooked.4 This is a remarkable oversight when one considers the salience of Irish concerns in Rowland’s œuvre (not to mention the high level of attention the singer has enjoyed in popular music culture).5 Rowland’s significance for the present study cannot be overstated: he was unarguably the first second-generation Irish popular musician to deploy overtly Irish themes and styles, with Dexys’ ‘Dance Stance’ predating the first Pogues record (usually credited with this achievement ) by nearly five years.6 Charting the diverse modes of ethnicity that Rowland invoked in the Dexys project, the chapter discerns six key impulses that took shape across the band’s output: first, a public rebuttal of popular prejudices about the Irish in England; second,a veneration of Brendan Behan,who emerges as a special figure of ethnic identification; third, a visual evocation of diaspora in the band’s ancillary media; fourth, a wish to evoke Irish issues, in the face of a perceived repression or silence; fifth, the cultivation of an expressly ‘Celtic’ aesthetic during the group’s second major period (1982–83); and sixth,the figuration of nostalgia,resistance and recovery – alongside overt assertions of Irish ethnicity – during the group’s third and final phase (1983–86). Before I begin my account of Dexys’ creative work, though, the chapter first locates Rowland, the band’s lead singer,chief songwriter and ‘major driving force’,in his social and cultural context.7 Introducing Kevin Rowland and Dexys Midnight Runners Kevin Rowland was born in Wolverhampton in the English Midlands in 1953. His parents, who had first settled in England at the end of the 1930s, came from Crossmolina in County Mayo. Like many Irish migrants of the period, Rowland’s father found work in Britain’s construction industry.However,after a decade and a half’s English residence, the family returned (with five children, including a twelve-month-old Kevin) to Mayo. There they would remain for a further three years, moving back to England when Kevin was four. The youngster appears to have been somewhat unsettled by this relocation to the English west Midlands, suggesting that his mother’s assurance that this was...

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